Today widely regarded as Brazil’s greatest female author, Clarice Lispector was born Chaya Pinkhasova Lispektor in 1920 in the Ukrainian shtetl of Chechelnik. Her family brought her to the Brazilian city of Recife only two years later. In 1973, after the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War, the Rio de Janeiro paper that employed her as a columnist fired her—along with its other Jewish journalists. Julia Kornberg writes:

Lispector never quite denied her Jewish roots, although she more often than not distanced herself from them, and promoted a fanciful non-Jewish etymology for her surname: Lispector, she said, meant “lilies on the breast,” suggesting that “lis” came from “fleur-de-lis” and “pector” from the Latin “pectus.” (Other more plausible origins include the Ashkenazi name Spector, meaning teacher’s assistant, or lis-inspektor, Ukrainian for forest inspector, a common Jewish profession at that time.)

Lispector took up translating as a way to make up for the lost income from the [newspaper] firing. She was heterodox in her choices. In her archives at Casa Rui de Barbosa, in Rio, you can see manuscripts of her translation of Yukio Mishima from the English translation into Portuguese and Hedda Gabler from “the Spanish, English, and French.” But the most important translation project she took on was Bella Chagall’s memoir of her Lubavitcher childhood in Vitebsk, Burning Lights.

Bella Chagall was born during Hanukkah in 1889, and Burning Lights is punctuated lovingly by Jewish holidays. In 1939, on the brink of catastrophe in Europe, her impulse was to return to her roots and her people’s God. Lispector’s decision, amid heightened anti-Semitism, to translate Chagall’s memoir of her Yiddish-speaking childhood into Portuguese seems to have also been a form of return. In 1976, she told an interviewer, “I am Jewish, you know, although I don’t believe that the Jewish people is the people chosen by God. . . . In the end, I am Brazilian, and that’s final, once and for all.”

At the time, Lispector was working on what would be her last book, a beautiful novella, The Hour of the Star. . . . The heroine of the novella, in the sole explicit reference to Jewish history in Lispector’s work, is named Macabéa.

Yesterday I saw an unconfirmed report that the Biden administration has offered Israel a massive arms deal in exchange for a promise not to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities. Even if the report is incorrect, there is plenty of other evidence that the White House has been trying to dissuade Jerusalem from mounting such an attack. The thinking behind this pressure is hard to fathom, as there is little Israel could do that would better serve American interests in the Middle East than putting some distance between the ayatollahs and nuclear weapons. Aaron MacLean explains why this is so, in the context of a broader discussion of strategic priorities in the Middle East and elsewhere:

If the Iran issue were satisfactorily adjusted in the direction of the American interest, the question of Israel’s security would become more manageable overnight. If a network of American partners enjoyed security against state predation, the proactive suppression of militarily less serious threats like Islamic State would be more easily organized—and indeed, such partners would be less vulnerable to the manipulation of powers external to the region.

[The Biden administration’s] commitment to escalation avoidance has had the odd effect of making the security situation in the region look a great deal as it would if America had actually withdrawn [from the Middle East].

Alternatively, we could project competence by effectively backing our Middle East partners in their competitions against their enemies, who are also our enemies, by ensuring a favorable overall balance of power in the region by means of our partnership network, and by preventing Iran from achieving nuclear status—even if it courts escalation with Iran in the shorter run.